Shadows on the Nile

by Kate Furnivall

  Monty gave a snort.

  ‘To finish quickly,’ Jessie declared, ‘there was a bit of old-fashioned cheating by Horus in a boat race, which meant he won the throne of all Egypt. And he ripped off Set’s testicles, making him as barren as the desert.’

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘But Set got his revenge by gouging out one of Horus’ eyes – the fabled Eye of Horus.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘That’s it, really.’

  ‘What? They all lived happily ever after?’

  ‘No. But Horus won. Good over evil.’

  ‘Is that what this is about?’ Monty’s look was abruptly sombre.

  She shook her head, a sudden tightness in her chest. ‘How do we know who is good and who is evil?’

  In the midst of the heat and chatter in the carriage, the question lay unanswered.

  ‘We have to rely on our own judgement,’ Monty said eventually. ‘It’s all we have.’

  ‘Yes. But can we trust it?’

  Monty released a long sigh. ‘You women!’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You women. You and Isis. Determined to risk everything to save your beloved brothers.’

  It hadn’t occurred to her. Isis and herself. Scouring Egypt for traces of their brother. Somehow, in some inexplicable way, it made a difference. She rested a hand on Monty’s wrist and turned her head to look out of the window at the fleeing desert where Set lived with his curved snout and forked tail, and nothing but scorpions for company.

  The solidity of Monty’s flesh and bone under her fingers kept her mind away from the thought that Set was also the god of storms.

  The third reason that the long journey from Cairo to Luxor proved to be entertaining was more unexpected. Monty was reading the Egyptian Gazette while Jessie was working out whether to ask the smart Egyptian gentleman opposite if he knew of a good hotel in Luxor, when the ticket collector in scarlet uniform and gold sash entered the carriage looking apologetic.

  ‘Miss Kenton?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have a friend travelling on this train?’

  ‘Yes, I do. He’s sitting right here.’

  ‘No.’ The official bowed politely to Monty. He was the sort of man with kindly eyes who looked as though he lived with too many women in his household. He had the unassuming browbeaten manner of a man used to being in the wrong. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Kenton, but I am referring to an Egyptian friend.’

  She was surprised. ‘No, no one I know.’

  ‘Ah, I thought as much. He claims you will pay for his ticket.’

  ‘Who is this person?’ she asked.

  ‘A nobody. Don’t concern yourself, madam.’

  There was a sudden flash of white teeth as a young face pushed in under his arm and bright black eyes peered in at her with a grin.

  ‘It is me, Missie Kenton. Malak.’

  35

  Georgie

  England 1932

  You are here. But you are not here. You do not listen to what I say. You barely speak. You run hands through your hair so roughly that threads of gold float down on your shoulders, and you kick my Indian exercise club so that it rolls back and forth across the floor.

  ‘I want you to go,’ I say.

  ‘To leave?’

  ‘Yes.’

  You upset me when you are like this. It makes me feel bad inside. I get jittery and nervous because you don’t want to be here.

  ‘I have a problem,’ you say.

  I don’t look at you. I open the wardrobe door a crack and peek at the darkness inside. Would you notice if I crept in there for a while? Some people are addicted to alcohol, others to chocolate or cocaine. When I am upset, I am addicted to darkness.

  I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say.

  ‘Go and look it up,’ you mutter.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘On the list, the list of answers.’

  ‘I want you to go,’ I mumble again.

  ‘Well, hard luck.’ You are flicking your lighter on and off, on and off, and it is driving me crazy.

  ‘Look it up,’ you shout at me.

  I leave the wardrobe door ajar and pull out the list from my bedside cabinet. I read through it slowly, testing out each possibility in my head. I reject the please and thank you and travel down to the two last ones. I’m sorry if I have offended you and the new one: You seem unhappy. What has happened? I regard them with distaste. I do not know how I can have offended you. You arrived like this today. It was nothing I did. But I know that doesn’t mean I am not at fault in some way. Blissful ignorance, you call it. Ignorance, yes. Blissful, no.

  The What has happened? question is worse.

  I don’t want to know what has happened, I just want you back the way you were, back to normal. I have tried different topics of conversation like the latest finds at Medinet Habu. Or whether the new construction of Broadcasting House in Portland Place in its modern art deco style will expand the BBC’s horizons in ways that excite you but won’t affect me one jot. That kind of question usually gets you all fired up. Today you stare at my shoes and don’t even hear what I say.

  Whatever has happened is bad. So I don’t want to know about it.

  ‘You seem unhappy,’ I say miserably. ‘What has happened?’

  For the first time you look at me. I glance fleetingly at your face and go to stand right next to the door of the wardrobe. Alarm is chewing on my eyeballs and I need to put them in the dark.

  ‘Georgie, come over here.’

  I shuffle a pace closer. You start to talk about our father, about the meetings you attend with him to listen to Sir Oswald Mosley speaking about Fascism and what it will do for this country. I watch my fingers tear a button from my shirt because I am so frightened.

  You have never done this before, telling me things about Pa.

  ‘You and I have talked about Sir Francis Galton before,’ you say carefully. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Of course I remember.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He was the cousin of Charles Darwin and invented the science of eugenics. He put forward the idea that it was possible to produce a highly gifted race of men by selective breeding.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And discourage the reproduction of undesirables in society.’ I walk away from you and pick up my heavy Indian club. ‘I know that I am an undesirable.’

  ‘Pa knows that too.’

  I swing the club. ‘I am not going to reproduce.’

  You watch the club. ‘Pa spoke to me last night about Adolf Hitler’s ideas on maintaining racial purity among the Aryans and about the huge following for Galton’s ideas in America and here in Britain at the eugenics centre in Lambeth.’

  I raise the wooden club and swing it down onto my bed. The springs moan.

  ‘Pa is very much in favour of the idea,’ you tell me.

  I swing the club again.

  ‘Georgie, listen to me. I am worried.’

  ‘I want you to leave now. Come back when you—’

  ‘Damn you, Georgie, I am not leaving.’

  You are shouting. I cover my ear with my left hand to block out the noise but keep the club in my right.

  ‘I am worried,’ you say more calmly, ‘that he might be planning to …’

  You stop. You start to make strange sobbing noises at the back of your throat. I back away further.

  ‘I am worried,’ you say again, ‘that he will not …’

  ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’

  ‘Don’t,’ you hiss at me. ‘The whitecoats will come.’

  I lift the Indian club with both my hands and slam it against the wardrobe door, which splinters into a thousand pieces and the noise scrapes on my eardrums.

  The whitecoats come and they make you leave.

  I have snakes in my head. It has not been a good week for me, not since you came and talked about Pa. The snakes are there, slithering through cracks in my skull. I hear the
m. All the time. Their hissing and their squirming, the rustle of their dry scales against the moist curls and coils of my brain.

  They are so boisterous that at times I dig a finger deep in my ear to try to hook one out. I am so desperate that I ask Dr Churchward to examine my ears with an otoscope to check on what the serpents are doing in there, but he laughs and sticks a needle in my arm instead. I even insist that he must use the brutal electric wires, attach them to my skull because it is the only way to kill the snakes – to shock them to death. But he refuses and forces a tablet into my mouth. I think about what you told me about Pa’s championing of eugenics and I quickly sick the tablet up in the secrecy of my door-less wardrobe. When you come, I am sitting in the gloom of the wardrobe staring at the tablet in its puddle of beetroot, redder and more ferocious than blood. I know it is beetroot, but it still scares me.

  You pace. Your footsteps sharp and accusing. I pull a shirt off a hanger and drape it over my face.

  ‘Georgie,’ you say. ‘Get out here.’

  I hiss in tune with the snakes, so that I won’t hear you. You wait a while, then you sit down on my bed. You never sit on my bed unless I am on it. I hiss louder.

  You say, ‘I’ll do you a deal. You come out of there and I’ll give you this.’

  You don’t say what this is.

  I am forced to remove the shirt. You are holding up a new record for my gramophone. I scurry out of the wardrobe and snatch it from your hand to see who it is. It is Louis Armstrong . I squeal with delight, remove it from its mouse-brown sleeve and place it on the turntable. I wind the handle and carefully position the needle in the groove, and when the notes of the trumpet pour into the room, they silence the snakes. I stomp triumphantly across the floor, grinding them into dust under my feet.

  I am bereft when the music stops. I start to wind the handle again but you say no.

  ‘Sit down and listen to me, Georgie. That was the deal.’

  ‘That wasn’t the deal.’

  ‘Sit. Down.’

  I sit. Scared. But the snakes have not returned, so I smile.

  ‘Don’t,’ you say.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t pull faces at me.’

  I am disappointed. I shrug and let the smile fall off my face.

  ‘Today,’ you say, ‘big things are going to happen.’

  I look at the wardrobe.

  ‘No,’ you say. ‘Stay where you are.’

  I stay.

  ‘You are going to have to trust me, Georgie. Do you trust me?’

  I nod.

  ‘Good,’ you say.

  But I don’t trust you. You are going to do something bad to me. I know it, but I don’t know how I know it.

  ‘Listen hard, Georgie. I am going to get you out of this place today.’

  Air drains out of my lungs as I look at your face and see you are completely serious. Not one of your jokes. I throw myself on my knees and slam my forehead on the floor to wake up the snakes again. I want their noise to drown out the sepulchral sound of your voice.

  ‘I don’t trust them.’ Your words are quiet and you prod me with your foot. ‘Get up.’

  I stay down.

  ‘Georgie, don’t be difficult. We have to leave. I haven’t got long. I went to a séance last night and …’

  ‘A séance?’

  ‘Yes. That’s not the point. Some people want me to go to Egypt immediately.’

  I raise my head. ‘Egypt?’

  ‘Yes. Secretly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter why.’ Your words tumble out in a rush to batter my ears. ‘This is the point. I have told them I can’t leave you here, as I don’t know when I’ll be back. Remember what happened to you last time I was in Egypt two years ago?’

  I don’t want to remember.

  ‘So this time, Georgie boy, you are coming with me.’

  My jaw drops. I am too shocked to scream. Slowly I start to crawl across the floor to the wardrobe.

  ‘No!’ Your grey-flannelled legs stand in front of me. ‘It’s that or …’

  ‘Or die,’ I finish. ‘I would rather die.’

  You – who know better than to touch me – seize me by the shoulders and yank me to my feet. You shake me till my teeth rattle.

  ‘Well, hard luck, brother. I’m the one making the choices.’ You lift your large heavy canvas knapsack from beside the door and pull out a black eye-mask. ‘With or without?’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  From the knapsack pocket you remove something enclosed in a box. You open the box. It contains a syringe. ‘With or without?’ you ask again.

  I look at you, grief-stricken. You have turned into Dr Churchward. My legs are shaking. A high thin wail comes out of my mouth.

  You grab my arm and push up my sleeve. I hold it there obediently like one of Pavlov’s dogs. You stick in the needle as if I am a pin cushion.

  We are on the roof.

  I don’t remember how we get here, how we climb the drainpipe, how you stop the ear-splitting wail coming out of my mouth. All I remember is you taking my cheeks between your strong hands, with your nose so close to mine it feels like the sun has dropped from the sky and is blasting heat in my face. Your mouth is all crooked.

  ‘Don’t let me down, Georgie,’ you say.

  I think you mean let you down from the roof, so I shake my head. Now we are on the roof and from your knapsack you drag a rope-ladder. I stare at it without realising what it is for, and when you drag me to the far end of the roof where I have never been, I start to sway from side to side, as though the wind is buffeting me. The snakes are silent. So I close my eyes with relief and find I am falling asleep on my feet like a horse.

  ‘Christ, Georgie. Move!’

  I force up my eyelids and prop them open with my fingers. I can’t recall why we’re up here but it is pleasant, with a faint trickle of autumn sunlight fingering the back of my neck. I try to sit down.

  ‘Here! Georgie!’

  You seize my hands and put them on a vent-pipe that is sticking up just behind the low balustrade. You have hooked the rope ladder over it.

  ‘How did you know it was here?’ I ask placidly.

  ‘I have prepared for this eventuality.’

  You are curt. Rude, I think. But my tongue has settled on the bottom of my mouth and lies there inert. It does dawn on me slowly that you must have been up here without me. I am jealous.

  ‘Now down the ladder,’ you order.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just do it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please, Georgie.’

  ‘No.’

  Before I can object, you push the eye-mask on my head and have me over the parapet, my feet clinging to the ladder. It is wobbly. I screech. You push a brown gob-stopper sweet into my mouth that tastes of flavours I have never before encountered. I roll it round my mouth.

  ‘Down,’ you hiss. Like one of the snakes.

  I descend. Uncertainly. And slowly. Hand under hand, foot under foot. The taste of sweetness on my idle tongue. You follow above me, and when I reach the ground you jump the last part, snatch off my mask and drag me into a run through a part of the garden I have never seen before.

  ‘Well done, Georgie. You’d make a spiffing burglar.’

  ‘But you are the burglar, Tim,’ I say, my words thick and lifeless in my mouth. ‘You are stealing me.’

  ‘True. Don’t slow down. Keep running.’

  I can’t run. Parts of me are shutting down.

  ‘Over the wall now.’

  A wooden ladder stands in front of us, propped up against the high garden wall by two men I’ve never seen before. It’s obvious they know you. They frighten me. Scare my limbs rigid. I can’t move.

  You look at me closely and I hear you swear under your breath. Gently, as if I am a kitten, you put an arm around my waist and draw me forward, one step at a time. I have to glare at my feet to make them stumble forward. I want to knock your arm away
, I want to run back to the house and bang on the front door to beg them to let me in.

  ‘Climb,’ you say softly in my ear.

  I climb.

  36

  Thebes.

  King of cities.

  City of the king of gods, the great and glorious Amun-Ra. Fabled capital of Ancient Egypt. Clenched fist of military might.

  Centre of learning and profound wisdom, pinnacle of political power twelve hundred years before Christ set foot in this world.

  Thebes was all these things.

  Waset was its Egyptian name found in ancient texts and meaning City of the Sceptre. Let all who gaze upon the place bow down in awe to the great god Amun-Ra. Given the name Thebai by the ancient Greeks, corrupted to Thebes by Egyptians, it is a city that has stared in the face of Ra, vying with the sun itself for the brightness of its gold and the immensity of its power. But it is a city that has also swallowed the dust of the desert and crumbled to ruins because its hubris inflicted humiliation and destruction.

  Thebes became nothing. In its place rose two small villages, Luxor and Karnak, existing like vultures on the tourism of the dead.

  Luxor.

  Where Jessie had pinned her hopes.

  *

  The heat of Luxor hit them even at this hour of the evening. Jessie stripped off her gloves and removed her hat, fanning herself with it, in awe of Monty who had the ability of the English upper classes to regard the heat as nothing more than an unwanted guest at a party and ignore it completely. He strode around in the moonlight gathering their luggage, sweeping aside the begging street urchins, summoning a taxi carriage and producing a native fly-whisk for her, all without breaking sweat or losing his smile.

  He found them a suitable hotel, the Blue Nile. Small, discreet and clean. He inspected their rooms for cockroaches before signing the register, declared them habitable, but wanted a torn mosquito net stitched and demanded fresh limes and boiled water to make a drink. The hotel staff in white galabayas bowed happily and scurried around to do his bidding. The problem, as Jessie saw it, was not the hotel, the problem was Malak.

  The young Egyptian boy weighed on her conscience. He had hopped on the train specially to travel to Luxor with her, so now she had no choice but to feel responsible for him. What would his mother say about it? And his wide-eyed little sisters? Train-travel in Egypt turned out to be extravagantly cheap, so the cost of the boy’s fare was negligible, but she and Monty were not here to be shown around the ancient sites by a child-guide. They didn’t need a puppy at their heels.